You can create a buzz – Get the word out about your products and services in a way that promotes online conversation and increases engagement.

Build relationships and become more personal – (expanding on the first point) Use a variety of social media, and you’ll build relationships with customers and potential customers. Trust comes through honesty and sincerity.

Branding – It is extremely important for a small business to create a recognisable identity for your product or service. This is the way the customer perceives you, and what better way to do this than the use of social media?

It opens up the line of communication between business owner and millions of potential customers – Millions of people who could possibly become customers? You could not have this easily in the offline world. Thank you social media!

Social networking with potential clients and customers from all over the globe – With social networking sites such as Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter (among many, many others) you can hold personal conversations with each of your customers. Tell them about new products, sales and coupons, suggestions and tips – the topics are endless!

Small businesses can compete with the large companies – In the past, this was very difficult with the advertising and marketing budgets of large companies. With the right type of viral social media, you could potentially get an immense amount of traffic which keeps coming for a long time.

Online reputation management – Social Media is a good way to keep an eye on what other people are saying about your name, company, or brand online – and if any problems or complaints arise, they can be dealt with.

Social media is much cheaper than traditional marketing and advertising – Social media marketing shouldn’t cost a small business nearly as much as traditional advertising. If you do it yourself it might not cost anything at all. It will, however, cost you time. This is why it is a good idea to hire someone to help with the social media marketing.

Find out exactly what your customers want – Social media is amazing in so many ways, as you can see from the last 8 reasons. But, maybe one of the most amazing things about it is that you don’t have to wonder what your customers want. Do you want to know what they want? Just ask them!

It provides another way for potential customers to find you – If you’re not high enough in the search engines for potential customers to find you, don’t worry they can still find you through social media. Even if you’re not on the front page of Google, it doesn’t mean you can’t receive traffic.

So there you have it. All small businesses should take advantage of the benefits social media can provide you with, it’ a no-brainer!

As a virtual assistant, I immediately presumed the worst, digital technology is automating more of the services I offer virtually. I was relieved to read further and discover that actually, a smartphone virtual assistant, or defined on Wikipedia as an ‘Intelligent personal assistant’, are satisfying users in their search for information.

Another key aspect of an intelligent personal assistant is its ability to organise and maintain information, making it quick and easy to access.

A search for information by text or voice command, answered by a software agent via your smartphone is a smartphone virtual assistant. But they can also be used for other things, not just answering questions, listening to and downloading music, reading books.

Google Now, Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Samsung S-voice are all virtual assistants that are currently being underutilised in the new technological world. Digital virtual assistants on our desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones are there to instantly help and assist.

E-Marketer attributing this to the generation of the which the users come from and their reasons for using them are different. Taken from E-Marketer’s post on the 17th February 2017 the reasons and generations are:-

Millennials were most likely to manage alarms, play music, play audiobooks and search for movie times.

Gen Xers were most likely to look up someone’s phone number, search for a song playing on the radio, create a shopping list and check news headlines.

Although the statistics in the article, based on an American survey by Higher Visibility SEO company, found that 28.7% still do not use smartphone virtual assistants.

So the next time you get out your smartphone here are just a few of the more customary search queries conducted via these assistants that you can perform, including requests to play music, manage alarms, find a weather forecast, search for a contact’s phone number or ask a fun question, the era of smarter smartphones is upon us!

In the meantime, if you smartphone virtual assistant can’t help you with those laborious tasks such as typing, or replying to emails, get a human virtual assistant such as Virtuadmin, where you can chat directly with me to discuss your virtual assistant requirements.

Video marketing, video viewing is the new content marketing, it is everywhere. What’s more is, it has evolved dramatically over the last 10 years. From the age of desktops to laptops, viewing videos has become even more portable, where they can be viewed by anyone, anywhere, with a hand-held device or tablet.

As marketers are embracing these new ways of visually showing their potential customers what their service or product is about, it delivers what the customer wants to see, when they want to see it.

So where is the link between Video marketing and it’s bright big future in content marketing with transcription services? Transcripts.

Transcripts that are you produced from the speech content in your marketing video have tremendous value. When uploaded to YouTube, for example, it enables Google search engine bots to have more information about the content of your video. Also by uploading an additional transcript, your video will be indexed by Google more accurately due to the keyword rich text it can now read. Effectively, from the transcript text, they can read about your video content and will rank higher in Google SERPs (search engine results pages) as a result.

If these big number percentage predictions and the facts as they are stated in Forbes, as a freelance transcriptionist, I see the way forward for video content marketing as building and forming relationships with transcription services.

I approach many video marketers online regarding adding a transcript to their video, they claim they are happy with the automatically generated captions that their video hosting provider applies when they upload a video.

However, it’s not just about captions for the hearing-impaired, what they do not realise is that Google and all other search engines DO NOT index video’s. The video hosting platform may automatically generate captions but search engines do not index them for search engine optimisation due to them not being reliable enough for indexing purposes.

Therefore, creating a transcript, for a freelancer trying to build up their business, or marketer building up their video marketing business, anyone with a low budget, small business, start-ups, freelancers really do provide quality services at a much smaller cost proportionate to specialist transcription vendors and video captioning agencies.

The way forward to getting a quality service for a fraction of the price is using virtual assistants, and they are very versatile in their abilities and skills and many have grown and developed their experience in this new digital age.

For a fraction of the price, contracting a virtual assistant with transcription skills, or a freelance transcriptionist can be your best asset for your video content marketing strategy for the duration of the campaign. To find a reputable typist or transcriptionist, from my experience, I can recommend People per Hour, Fivesquid and Fiverr.

If you know that you are planning a series of videos, no matter how short or long in length, or how frequently, building up a rapport with a transcriptionist, will create a rapport that builds trust. You are assured of creating your video, while the transcriptionist, in the agreed timeframe, will deliver the transcript back to you.

A virtual assistant wth transcription experience, such as myself outsourcing under the brand of Virtuadmin, can be a big asset and contributor to the success of your video content marketing campaign. I brand myself because I am not just a transcriptionist, I can copy type documents and recreate them quickly. I can also compile Health & Safety Manuals for the completion of commercial buildings, but that was in another life in construction before freelancing. You never know what hidden talents of a virtual assistant can help and assist you.

My qualifications are in Information Technology, Bookkeeping, Secretarial and Construction. Since the advancement of technology and quick growth of the internet and social media in the last 10 years, my past experience is among things, copy-typing a unique authour’s book, captioning a series of juicing videos (one example can be viewed on my home page, select CC for the captions to appear), social media management But in the last couple of years equally split equally between copy-typing and audio or video transcription.

A professional transcriptionist, if using professional software like myself, Express Scribe Professional software can play video via their software player, type into text and create your transcript a text format (.txt) document that will be uploaded to your video host hosting platform and gain higher quality recognition from search eng bots.

So videos future for content marketing? Look at the bulleted facts and figures about video as the future of content marketing, then remember that the one advantage for your marketing video is to add a transcript. It instantly boosts search engine optimisation and not only that, there are other valuable assets to a transcript Take content from the transcript and create Tweets, Facebook posts, topics to go deep into in a blog post.

Being on a tight budget it’s always about cost, but the value of a transcript for your video marketing now and in the future has to be, has to be weighed against the initial investment, when you think of the alternatives that it can be used for, in conjunction with promotion and separate for blog posts.

Content Automation

Podcasts are a great way to connect your audio (or video) content into the public sphere, it is not just about music these days. If you are a business, for example, if it is quite a specialised niche, this can be a great way to get your product or service noticed, holding regular podcasts online or distributing regular content via this medium. This new way of communication can gain valuable new customers and increase relevant traffic to your website.

Currently, most who are familiar with podcast hosting are technically savvy, but it is clear that podcasting will be more than a passing fad as many businesses are adopting podcasting and employing it in unusual yet powerful ways. Podcasting can be used for talk shows, tutorials, music demos, educational training, stories, comedy clips, debates or even foreign language tutorials.¹

Not only is podcasting a type of advertising, it gives you more visibility for your niche subject. It also has great SEO (search engine optimisation) benefits too. Listeners will visit your website to listen to your podcast or download it. For them to find it in the first place, your podcast has to be optimised for it to rank highly and be found.

Transcription Services

Podcasts can vary in their format but usually are delivered in audio, video, PDF and ePub formats. Luckily, all of these formats can very easily and economically have a transcript produced and uploaded to them, further increasing the SEO of your website, therefore more visitors seeing and listening to your podcasts.

A freelance transcriptionist like myself here at Virtuadmin or transcription vendors can all assist in the process of creating your accurate text document that acts as a transcript to upload to your podcast.

By hiring a transcription service to transcribe your podcast content into text will boost your reach as it is supporting content that you want to be exposed to search engines for indexing. By uploading your transcript that is by the nature of the transcribed content will be keyword rich, to your podcast, search engine bots can accurately index it, increasing your search engine results pages for that particular niche search.

Show Notes

When you are getting higher results, more visitors and listeners, you could then move on a step further with the text content you have invested in from your transcriptionist or transcription service. You could:-

Brief synopsis of the episode

Turn the transcript into show-notes with time-stamps and sub-headings

Offer the transcript in its original form to listeners

Create key takeaways

Create slide presentations

Get ideas for checklists and worksheets

Once you have the transcript all the bulleted points above can be produced easily. Ask your transcription service if they can assist, as they are transcribing the content. Ask for your transcript to be time-stamped and specify the regularity. If you don’t have the time to create presentations, key takeaways, checklists or worksheets your transcriptionist may be able to assist or outsource to a Virtual Assistant like me at Virtuadmin. Freelancers and virtual assistants are a fantastic way of getting a professional job done without incurring the high expense!

If you don’t have the time to create presentations, key takeaways, checklists or worksheets your transcriptionist / virtual assistant may be able to assist, like me at Virtuadmin. Freelancers and virtual assistants are a fantastic way of getting a professional job done without incurring the high expense!

Top marketing professionals have voiced their opinions of YouTube Marketing for this coming year, 2017.

In an article written by Lisa. D. Jenkins, in Social Media Today, where the Pros have made their predictions in what they think will happen to video marketing. Although they are talking about YouTube, the second biggest search engine to Google, it is largely about video marketing for businesses and the marketing direction it could take.

These are all valid predictions, YouTube is a great way for increasing visibility of your product or service, and love when these predictions come out in the early parts of the year, this year being no different.

YouTube Integrates Third-party Software to Improve Broadcast Quality

YouTube Marketers Focus on Educational Content Delivery

Increased Socialisation Features Improve YouTube Engagement

YouTube Promotes Longer Engagement Views

YouTube Improves Social Features for Creators and Fans

With statistics in 2016 for the total number of hours of video watched being 3.25 billion, combined with the vital fact that YouTube and other video hosting platforms do not index videos with automatically generated captions.

What does this mean for marketers, entrepreneurs and anyone else wishing to utilise the power of video marketing on YouTube and such like? Upload a transcript in the format of a text (.txt) file to your video.Video search engine bots, just like Google crawler bots that are curious about your content and how to index it, therefore getting higher search engine rankings, cannot read images, GIFs or hear the audio speech. What the SEO bots rely on when the post is not in a contextual format, is text, tags, meta and other more in-depth search engine strategies.

YouTube search engine bots, just like Google crawler bots that are curious about your content and how to index it, therefore getting higher search engine rankings, cannot read images, GIFs or hear the audio speech in that video. What the SEO bots rely on when the post is not in a readable text format containing keywords, tags, meta and other more in-depth search engine strategies.

In number 3 on the predictions list, YouTube embraces quality over quantity, adding an additional transcript immediately tells YouTube about your content, therefore giving it a higher quality rating over others that have no transcript at all.

Number 5 on the predictions list, ‘YouTube Marketers Focus on Educational Content Delivery’ expert Zontee Hou’s prediction, explained “instead of the 30-second video demos of recipes that have taken over Facebook, success on YouTube will require companies to create 1- to 5-minute in-depth demos, courses, and series that answer the viewers’ questions”.

So for educational content that you want to be visible to everyone, even if it is 5 minutes long, you could add a transcript to it for just £5 if you are paying in Sterling, or $5 if paying in United States Dollars.

With The total number of people who use YouTube – 1,300,000,000 and over 30 million visitors per day, can you afford not to add a transcript?

If you have any questions at all about how to add a transcript, how to create one, or about my video transcription service, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

A big thank you to the writers and designers at Start Blogging Online for this guest post-Infographic and kindly asking to post on the Virtuadmin website.

The most important thing in writing an e-book is that you inspire people to do something or to take a positive step forward. This is the theme of most e-books. They inspire people to either change their eating habits or start fitness routines that they can easily follow.

E-books cover a wide range of topics, but they were mostly written by experts in specific areas. This is why they can easily motivate people to change because what they have written was based on their personal experiences.

If you consider yourself an expert or knowledgeable enough in a particular field, then you can go ahead and start writing an e-book. Take note though that this is not an easy endeavour. You have to work overtime and come up with really interesting ideas for you to sell the book that you have written.

You need to speak from the heart, but also understand what it is that your target group wants to read. You must have coherent ideas presented in a beautiful manner. It takes time before you can finish the entire e-book, but once it is done, you will surely be proud of what you have made.

It is time to get moving now and write your first e-book. To help you out, we have compiled the best tips for you to follow. The image below will give you ideas on how you can start an e-book and come up with something special for people to read.